Eiji Matsuda’s My Monster Secret is a manga about morons. By coming to terms with that, I got a ton of enjoyment watching morons flail about haphazardly.
Asahi Kuromine is the person publishers would never hire since he’ll give journalists all the secrets. With his worst trait known to almost everyone at school, he only lives to keep the secret that he has a crush on mysterious Shirogami Youko to himself — but fails spectacularly. With his secret known and his friends’ encouragement, he then decides to seek Shirogami out and reveal his love to her. When he does find her, he’s immediately greeted with wings and sharp teeth inside an empty classroom. Now that he’s discovered her secret that she’s a vampire, he then promises he’ll do whatever it takes to keep her secret a secret.
Going into My Monster Secret, I only knew of the anime but didn’t watch it, so obviously, Seven Seas found it best to get this title out and see where it’ll go from here. In reading the premise it seemed clear what angle it would go between comedy and romance, but little did I realize that the main cast had to have the lowest IQ ever for all of the shenanigans to be funny. I can’t fault the author, because it worked. I found this to be hilarious for most of the volume, ranging from how Asahi tries and fails so hard to keep his poker face, to trashy newspaper reporter Mikan and her thinking it’s ok to eat someone else’s shrimp, like we’re back in middle school or something.
What I didn’t expect were the moments of thoughtful commentary by the characters. In the first chapter Asahi finds out Shirogami’s secret. He wanted to reveal he loved her despite what he’d seen, but instead, he blundered and said “friend.” When he looked it over, he realized that was probably for the best, considering what should’ve happened — Shirogami’s supposed to keep her vampire powers a secret, but she was caught. Asahi could’ve kept the secret, but easily used that to his advantage by threatening her to be his girlfriend. Instead he “failed”, which obviously extends the story, but works in looking back to that moment.
Considering we have a story with a dense vampire, “the Holy Sieve”, and an alien with a military background piloting a mech that looks just like her (ok it’s not called a mech but I’m going to say it is!), I doubt we’ll get too many touching thoughts. But for a first volume, My Monster Secret is solid. I’m convinced this volume wouldn’t have had the right amount of nuance/good jokes/readability if it wasn’t for the A+ team working on this (The Nibley twins, Lianne Sentar, & Annaliese Christman!?). I’m a bit torn on the art (the characters seem nice in parts, but not exactly memorable), and I don’t think being complete morons can last so long, but I’m excited to see where this series will go from here.